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Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 512MB

Phoronix: Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 512MB

Earlier this month the ATI Radeon HD 4600 series from AMD was unveiled as the new mid-range graphics cards derived from their flagship RV770 graphics core. The Radeon HD 4650 and Radeon HD 4670 are the two RV730-based products now available. The ATI Radeon HD 4670 may not be able to compete with the Radeon HD 4800 series in all of the tests, but at a price of under $100 USD is it worth pursuing? For this article we have our hands on the brand new Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 512MB graphics card as we test it on Ubuntu Linux to see how well it can perform in our OpenGL tests and overclock with the recently added OverDrive support.

"With the low noise output from the Radeon HD 4670, this may make it an ideal candidate for a Home Theater PC."

Until vsync support is added so that ATI xv output can be tearing-free, how can any ATI card be an ideal candidate for a linux based HTPC?

Reviews like this cause people like me to go out and buy ATI hardware for their mythtv box then spend a week days pulling our hair out wondering why there is this ugly distracting break-line that crawls around the screen when there is motion.

"With the low noise output from the Radeon HD 4670, this may make it an ideal candidate for a Home Theater PC."

Until vsync support is added so that ATI xv output can be tearing-free, how can any ATI card be an ideal candidate for a linux based HTPC?

Reviews like this cause people like me to go out and buy ATI hardware for their mythtv box then spend a week days pulling our hair out wondering why there is this ugly distracting break-line that crawls around the screen when there is motion.

Exactly the reason why my htpc's with ATI integrated chipsets all now have cheap fanless nvidia's in them.

Replace for IGP and RAM

Is the 4670 ready to replace the IGP and be supported by the Linux distros yet or would it be more prudent to wait a month or so before I take that step.

I want to upgrade RAM and the video card and the 4670 sounds like a good fit for me. I am also looking at the 9600GT as well. I don't do a lot of gaming at all and wouldn't care if I never did. I do want good equipment that makes use of what my computer can do and my IGP just does not do that IMNSHO. Question is whether it is better to upgrade the RAM first and then the video card, do both at the same time or do the video card first and then the ram.

Right now I have about 10 distros on my PC - 3 64-bit distros and 7 32-bit distros. Need to weed that down but I want to get the base computer set up first so I can get the best experience from the distro and then decide what to cut.

"With the low noise output from the Radeon HD 4670, this may make it an ideal candidate for a Home Theater PC."

Until vsync support is added so that ATI xv output can be tearing-free, how can any ATI card be an ideal candidate for a linux based HTPC?

Reviews like this cause people like me to go out and buy ATI hardware for their mythtv box then spend a week days pulling our hair out wondering why there is this ugly distracting break-line that crawls around the screen when there is motion.

My nvidia card has screen tearing, too.
Honestly, my 8600gt is worse for video playback than my x700 is. At least with the x700 I could use the opengl overlay for video playback and get near perfect upscaling.

Make sure that you're not running a composite manager such as compiz. Composite managers cause the driver to render your video offscreen and then it's up to the composite manager to draw the contents on the screen, which could account for the tearing you're seeing.

My nvidia card has screen tearing, too.
Honestly, my 8600gt is worse for video playback than my x700 is. At least with the x700 I could use the opengl overlay for video playback and get near perfect upscaling.

Can't speak for newer ati cards, though.

Had a combo mythbe/fe with an NV 7800GS, great video quality. I built a dedicated mythfe on a 780G/Radeon 3200 microATX board. I had tearing; I didn't even know what that ugly line was until I did a weeks worth of research and combed through these forums.

Like deanjo I put a cheap fanless NV card in (7200GS I think) and presto, great video quality on the mythfe.

So right now I'm pretty annoyed at the suggestion that ATI/AMD video hardware is appropriate for linux HTPC use. I think it is totaly fair and understandable that ATI has the vsync feature low on their prority list (or they are hoping the OSS driver will implement it or whatever); I just think that linux information on the ATI hardware should be pretty clear that there are several applications it won't work well for.

Aside: One thing I did with both NV cards that did not work well with ati chip is to enable the OpenGL for verticle sync option. I haven't tried without it so it may be important (or not).

Make sure that you're not running a composite manager such as compiz. Composite managers cause the driver to render your video offscreen and then it's up to the composite manager to draw the contents on the screen, which could account for the tearing you're seeing.

I don't think this has an effect on the nVidia binary driver, which as I understand it, doesn't follow the standard methods/procedures in their driver.

However, for ATI, it certainly applies. With compiz the opengl overlay on my x700 has massive screen flicker.